Liberty Lyceum Travel

We have a portable Wi-Fi hotspot to connect to the Internet, as I explained in my last post, which uses a Spanish phone number to connect to the cellular network in Spain (and will use different numbers to connect to the cellular networks in Italy and England). However, we don’t want to use those numbers to make voice calls or send text messages. That would be very expensive for calling back to the States!

Instead, using our Wi-Fi Internet connection, I’ll use an app on my iPhone called Line2 to make phone calls and send text messages. I have a second phone number (using the good old 415 San Francisco area code) that I can use to call any number in the U.S. (or Canada) for no charge over the standard monthly fee of $9.95 for service. Although I usually don’t care much for talking on the phone, I’m going to miss my husband Neil a lot, and our daughter will miss him, too. So it’s nice to know we’ll be able to tell him all about our adventures every day, without running up a huge bill. We’re also used to being able to connect quickly through text messages, and those are included and unlimited with the plan.

Calls within Spain (and within Italy and England) are really inexpensive, 2 cents per minute — forget those outrageous roaming charges! The audio is of high quality (high-definition when you connect with another Line2). Line2 also includes visual voicemail. I’m already hooked on that from our home phone service (it also uses VoIP, over the Internet), so I’m glad we’ll also have it on our travels.

Line2 is one of New York Times columnist David Pogue’s “10 favorite iPhone apps.” Here is his video explaining why:

The only downside to Line2 is that our $9.95 per month plan works only on one phone. So, we have it on my iPhone, and Miss C, who’s already a frequent Skype user, will use Skype on her iPhone for phone calls if she needs it. But let’s face it, she’s 13 — she’s not going to be making any phone calls. She will be texting. For that, she’ll use TextPlus, which works over the Internet. The ad-supported version is free.

There’s a practical aspect to all this, but it’s also a fun experiment to see how efficiently, and inexpensively, we can keep being geeks while we travel!

As our departure day approaches, we’ve been organizing the technology we’ll need to enjoy ourselves on our trip. We’re a geek family with a collection of gadgets, and besides, we need all this stuff to share our travels with you here!

Thanks to my husband Neil for helping my daughter and me sort out the electrical power requirements for all our gadgets, in the three countries we’ll be visiting. All of our devices — two Mac laptops, two still cameras, a video camera, two iPhones, and a portable Wi-Fi hotspot (more on that in another post) — are rated for 120/240 VAC electrical systems, so we don’t need to convert the power in Europe for them, only to add plug adapters to fit their electrical outlets.

Most small hotel rooms won’t have enough electrical outlets for all our gadgets, so we started our power collection with two Travel Power Strips from Voltage Valet (see photo above left). These are great because they fold up compactly for packing; have three electrical outlets and a USB port; and they are also dual-voltage.

The plug on my US power cord (left) and the beefier adapter for the UK

Then, to add on to the American plug at the end, we have three adapters: one for Spain (and the rest of Continental Europe), one for Italy, and one for England. Every evening, all the batteries will be charging! In my next post, I’ll fill you in on our phone and Wi-Fi solution.